Proceedings OF ThE - Australian Institute of Animal Management Inc

70 Proceedings 2012
AIAM Annual Conference on Animal Management
13
Governance and Strategic Planning for Animal Management
– how to link it all up
Shane Scriggins and Dick Murray
Sunshine Coast Council, Queensland
President AIAM
A strategic plan for animal management needs
to be more than just an operational plan. While a
check list of things that need doing (in an operational
sense) may be a very good thing to have, such a list
does not constitute a strategic plan. A strategic plan
does however need to include operational matters,
but it should be more than this. It must, in a technical
sense, be a comprehensive statement of governance
compliance. To achieve this objective, a strategic
plan needs to successfully describe the enabling
mechanisms behind operations as well as it does
the operations themselves. In this day and age, a
strategic plan should also demonstrate a dynamic
capacity to accommodate anticipated (and perhaps
significant) changes in an operating environment.
The two principal users of Local Government
Strategic Animal Management Plans are the
Councils themselves and their clients (i.e. residents,
visitors, industry and special interest groups etc). To
be meaningful for both of these user groups, Strategic
Animal Management Plans need to satisfactorily
explain the ”why” and the “how” of Council’s
approach to Animal Management as thoroughly as
they explain the “what” and the “when”.
Good Strategic Animal Management Planning
requires, perhaps before all else, a comprehensive
“user friendly” format. There is no advantage in
having a strategic plan that does not “work” at the
community level. Such plans need to be clearly
structured, easily understood and readily available
for community review and comment.
Introduction – What is strategy?
The purpose of a Strategic Plan is to determine
direction. Johnson and Scholes 1 define strategy as:
“the direction and scope of an organisation over
the long-term: which achieves advantage for the
organisation through its configuration of resources
within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of
markets and to fulfil stakeholder expectations”
In other words, strategy is about direction,
scope, advantage, resources, environment and
stakeholders.
Developing a business strategy is not a new concept
in the corporate world, without them, surviving the
recent global financial crisis (GFC) would have been
an unlikely scenario for many. For local government
however, their vulnerability to the GFC was less
challenging because “market choice” is not an option
for its customers. Given this scenario, has local
government positioned itself to navigate through a
crisis and has strategic business planning been a
priority or has it slipped under the radar?
If the answer is “slipped under the radar do not
despair, the tide is beginning to turn. 2009 saw in
Queensland the introduction of a dynamic piece of
legislation the “Local Government Act 2009”. This
Act was dynamic in that prescriptive legislation,
once an iconic beacon for all things legal had been
removed, and was replaced with a “principles based”
drafting platform. For the first time since Federation,
local government had a statutory obligation to
apply transparency, democracy, good governance,
sustainability and ethics in its decision making
process.
Why have Strategic Animal Management
Planning in Local Government?
To encourage local government compliance with
the new Act, the Queensland Parliament legislated
that local government must develop and implement
Community Plans, plans built in collaboration with
and driven by its community. Parliament rightly
believed that the liveability of a community or a
local government area is generally driven by the
cumulative decisions of local government and its
residents. A Community Plan was viewed as the
vehicle by which Council and the community could
develop a strategic direction for the region, improve
relationships, develop long term partnerships and
build on that capacity to help maintain and enhance
the vitality, sustainability and liveability of the local
government’s area.
1 Exploring Corporate Strategy 1st Paperback Edition 1998